Digital Stuffing

I’ve long been a fan of Doritos and their continued innovation in the online marketing space. From Crash the Superbowl, to design an XBox game and a lot more too. Their latest (in the UK) is an interactive film/game called iD3.

Doritos iD3 (screenshot from site)

The Plot

Set in the near future, it’s all about identify theft. You’ve been ‘recruited’ as a mole for the Serious Fraud Squad and have to try and get access to the boss. It’s in 3 chapters being released over the next few weeks, so you have to wait and remember to come back for the next episode.

The Interaction and Gameplay

It’s all shot in the first person, so you are the hero in this story. You get to upload your image which appears in various places, id cards etc throughout the story. There’s a further level of connection if you decide to use Facebook as your login, where it will pull information from your profile and insert into the narrative. I;ve tried this before with Prototype Experience (blog post and it added little given my paucity of information).

However, I was underwhelmed by the gameplay. There are a number of points where you have to make a choice to drive the plot, go one way or the other, but most of the time I’m just watching a film. Maybe I just chose the ones that had the straightest path through the story, but I did not feel I added a lot. I wasn’t doing anything, just watching with the occasional click. I though there was no personal involvement. I’m hoping this will get better and they’ll be asking more of me. They’ve had to balance accessibility and ease of play and it looks like they’ve chosen the easiest route – no puzzles, little thinking required, just sit back and watch.

To play the game, you have to have bought a bag of Doritos and enter the code from the bag. There’s obviously peril involved, as you are given 6 lives per Dorito code; to get more lives you have to buy more snacks. That’s the better deal than the ones where you have to enter a code from every single time you enter; at least you get the chance to survive throughout and win a variety of prizes.

The Competition

It’s complicated. The main contest seems to need you to guess the name of a mystery flavour, an option that is provided right up front, so it appears to be a wild guess with no clues. If you do, you get the chance to win £20k. Everyone who does enter gets added into a separate draw. Then there are prizes awarded whilst playing the game, which are just awarded randomly. Doritos have partnered with O2 for some of these prizes. There’s a final contest for those who complete the 3 episodes, where a draw picks someone who then gets to pick a mystery envelope form a range containing various amounts of money.

The Branding and Production

Absolutely superb. The site is high quality, the story line is good, the filming looks excellent. The Doritos brand is embedded throughout the story, from subtle touches of having bags of the crisps being eaten by characters. The bags – and the competition – are a key plot story so it’s completely integrated. I’m slightly surprised that they allowed the brand to be so integral in a story about illegal activities (based on some recent experience) but feel that’s the only way to get it into the story without it feeling shoe-horned in, so well done that brand manager.

The Pitch

An lovely email (from someone I know) which has obviously gone through the marketing review given some of the slightly over the top hyperbole presented. The best touch though is that the team involved has obviously thought about digital outreach from the start. I’m provided with a PR code to play the game; on entering I’m told I’m not eligible for prizes. It’s been coded in from the start, which is impressive.

Summary

A high-production value movie, with interesting touches and a strongly integrated brand. overall, I liking it a lot.

By osmosis (well, me talking about it a lot) the New Business Team in the office have been using Twitter more and more. This afternoon, they took the initiative to do a real time marketing response following a Tweet from MarketingUK

Marketing UK Cupcakes (Screenshot from site)

They dashed out, bought a bunch of cupcakes from Patesserie Valerie, stickered them all up and delivered them to the Marketing UK‘s office. The response:

Marketinguk Cupcake Response (screenshot from site)

Update: Just realised that throughout this piece and when I’ve been talking to people I’ve been calling this Smart Thinking Soldier when it’s actually Start Thinking Soldier. Think my way is better

In the past, the Army have delivered some really smart campaigns that take you from the TV ad (or other offline channel) back to the website where they can immerse you in the story and get you spending a lot more time with their content in an effort to sign you up.

Their latest campaign, Smart Thinking Soldier, does exactly that again. The TV ads leave you with a scenario for you to choose what to do next. Online, the story continues with some smart gameplay in tagging IEDs and navigating tunnels. But that’s as far as I got. In a similar way to Lucy, writing in The Guardian, I’m defeated by technology. A combination of too heavy content that freezes my machine on occasion, a very fluid mouse interaction that leaves me sea-sick when I’m hunting around a room for IED elements and a navigation system that leaves me not being able to direct my player round a maze.

The site looks good, has great content, brilliant interactive elements, downloads a lot of information for you but leaves me wanting more – wanting to actually play it! I’m wondering if they would have been better off making the whole thing a downloadable app?

Alfa have produced an interesting game to support the launch of their new car, the Alfa Mito, it’s the Mito Rally

Alfa Mito. Screenshot from site

The game is spread across 10 sites, such as TopGear, Maxim and MSN. Each site basically has the same flash game, with different stages of a racing game. You have to compete in all 10 stages to be in with a chance of winning one of the prizes – a Wii, iPod Touch and IPod Nano each week and a Alfa Mito for the overall winner of the 9 week contest.

Lovely idea here, taking the common flash racing game idea and adding a great media spin to it – I’m guessing there’s all the placements are ‘added value’ instead of straight media buys. At each point, there are reminders to test drive the car, find a dealer or get more information, pushing the idea that you have to get out and drive the car.

When you go to play the game, you get offered the chance to login/create an account – or just play as guest. This reduces the barrier so that you can play before you commit to giving away your information. The race itself is pretty straighforward, each version just having a different background. I was a little disappointed with the game itself, there was no real crashes or bangs when I drove into things! But the concept and general execution is very good.

Alfa Mito Race - Screenshot from site

Collins Language are doing some fun stuff with their Adopt a Word campaign. It’s all about supporting the I Can charity, which helps children with speech, language and communication difficulties. You can Adopt a Word, from £20, the money going to the charity. In return, they send you a ‘certificate of ownership, for that word. So whether you want to buy a ‘diamond’ or the definitive article ‘the’ you can get it all for yourself. They’ve got some great new words on offer as well, such as ‘disemvowel’, the art of removing vowels from web comments so they become far less intelligible.

They’ve also got this widget with a daily word test from Nicholas Parsons – do you know what he knows? Take it and have ago at improving your vocabulary.

This is a nice little social responsibility campaign for a dictionary company; the right charity connection, some celebrity endorsement and tools that all fit in with the core product, that of words.

A few weeks ago, at Playful, Roo Reynolds demonstrate how to turn his plastic guitar into a real guitar, or at least an instrument you can play your own music on instead of just following the onscreen cues.

Roo Reyolds plays “Hotel California” from Tom Armitage on Vimeo.

The Idea

The popularity of the games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero may be leading to an increase in sales for the real instruments, a situation the Guitar Centre is trying to capitalise on. They’ve pulled together a nice site where you can personalise a video e-card, by uploading your face or just adding your name, to let your nearest and dearest know that all you want for Christmas is a Real Guitar.

A real Guitar (screenshot from site)

You have 4 videos to choose from, from a cheesy song through to a lovely arty one, so go ahead and decide which one suits you.

What I think

I like the site design, I like the choice of options and I like the very, very cheesy song. It’s topical and works well in the current craze for music games, it has a single purpose and keeps to that. I was a little disappointed that there were not many easter eggs on the site, as the design is perfect for that, but the one that is there at least gives you 10% off your guitar.

The Pitch

A great pitch to the right email with the right sort of information from Cohn&Wolfe (someone I don’t think I’ve heard from before). This was not a full social media Press Release, but a short note that pointed me inthe right direction. I liked the fact that they also pointed me to a similar site as a way to extend the story, more tips for me to follow. The site was Elf Yourself, the subject of a post I’ve not finished yet!

Hewlett Packard (with their agency Publicis Modem) bring you this quite cute game, You play Dave, a network master, who gets to wander round the levels working his IT Kwando, collecting ring tokens and battling the forces of phishers and crackers. Well, you would if the game worked right. I got to the second level onthe first go; on the second, after I’d killed everyone, it showed me all the tokens but would not let me collect and then just kept incrementing my score!

HP IT Kwando screenshot from site

The game is there to support Procurve, HPs Network Solutions. I think it gets its targeting right, putting the game in mystical terms, about how Dave showed the way, as long as you assume that the guys with the money to buy the solution are as much a geek as those who may be SysAdmins. There’s a little branding, but once inthe game, you can’t find a link to the product – there’s no link back so no integration with the rest of the marketing. This definitely feels like an add on to the message, not a key part. (It is fun though when it works)

The Idea

This is an ad for a camera – a tough, take it anywhere, simple to use camera from Oregon Scientific. They’ve tied up with sport of Bearded Ladyboarding to promote their ATC3K Action Camera, shooting the athletes doing their runs downhill.

Apparently this extreme sport has its origins over a millennium ago, “when Vikings in isolated parts of Northern Europe would competitively race rudimentary wooden boards down steep hills as part of an annual festival to celebrate their masculinity.” The sport came back to popularity in the early 70′s, along with the traditional dress and beard, The sport got popular with rock bands, where beards were common and continued to grow, although today there are some who dare to try it clean-shaven. There’s now even an attempt to get it involved in the 2012 Olympics.

The site itself has a pretty good game that kept me involved – nothing too complex, just a racing game. It’s worth playing to see the videos at the end of it, where you can link out to the main site for information about the product. You can play the game to win a camera, grab some images or watch the video.

What I think

Of course, the sport of Bearded Ladyboarding is completely made up, but I guess they had fun in the process. I’ll admit that Oregon Scientific is not a company I’d heard of but they’re trying some cool marketing to promote their goods. I like this, it’s completely silly whilst demonstrating the product well.

According to the email I got :This game was fashioned by Rubber Republic for Oregon Scientific to promote the ATC3K Action Camera to blokes in UK, France, Germany and Italy in the run up to Christmas.” I like the fact they do not seem to be releasing this and leaving it up there, they’re going to be testing the links out and refining them as appropriate, to track what works best and to do more of it. I also like that they’ve brought the language and tone to the main site, which is so often missed when a brand develops a game; leaving it as a standalone just looks like it’s an add-on and not one they are paying attention to. That’s not the case here, everything seems to tie together well.